Altcoin Rules: one 0–100 risk score per coin

Altcoin Rules answers one question: how heated or how cheap does this coin look right now, compared with its own history and with the wider market? Instead of reading ten charts, you get one number from 0 to 100 and a breakdown of what feeds it.

It combines indicators that look at different things: where the coin sits against its long-term trend, how strong its recent momentum is, how far it is from its 4-year high, how much of the market it holds, how fearful or greedy the market feels, and Bitcoin-wide measures such as mining cost. The idea behind the scale is simple. When most of them point to a cheap market, the score is low. When most point to an overheated market, it is high.

The first input, Risk Wave, is part of Altcoin Rules and has the biggest default weight. Altcoin Rules uses it together with the others, so no single input decides the score. There is also a free, lighter version of the same idea: the Altcoin Rules checklist.

The score runs from 0 to 100. The page splits it into five zones, each with its own colour. Low scores mean the inputs see a cheap, calm market. High scores mean they see an expensive, crowded one.

Treat a zone as context for how careful to be, not as an instruction. A score can stay in one zone for months, which is why the page also shows how long the coin has been in its current zone and how that compares with earlier visits.

Every input is first turned into its own 0 to 100 score. The core score is then a weighted average of those scores. An input with a bigger weight pulls the average harder, and an input that has no data right now is left out, so the weights of the remaining ones are scaled up to fill the gap.

By default, seven inputs carry weight for a single coin: Risk Wave (25), 2-Week RSI (20), Fear & Greed (15), BTC Production Cost (10), and 4-Year High Distance, Dominance and ALT/BTC Ratio (5 each). The ALT/BTC Ratio does not apply to Bitcoin itself, so Bitcoin uses six. Three more inputs, the Stablecoin Supply Ratio, MVRV (Bitcoin's market value against the price its coins last moved at) and Altcoin Breadth, are shown on the page but currently carry weight 0, so they do not move the score. We can retune the default weights, so the page is the place to see the weights in use today.

Funding Rate (leverage pressure) and Token Unlocks (upcoming supply) are not part of the core average. They appear as separate live modifiers next to the score, because they change fast and only exist for some coins. If a coin has no futures market or no unlock data, the page says so instead of guessing.

In Custom mode you can move the weights yourself and apply them to see how the score changes. A switch also lets Risk Wave and 2-Week RSI run on market cap instead of price, so token inflation and unlocks do not distort the read.

Pair mode scores one coin against another, such as ETH against BTC, as a ratio. USD-based inputs like Fear & Greed or Dominance do not make sense for a ratio, so they are switched off. The ratio is scored on six inputs instead: Risk Wave, 2-Week RSI and 4-Year High Distance on the ratio, plus the Mayer Multiple (price against its 200-day average), MACD Momentum and the Funding Spread between the two coins.

The Funding Spread needs a futures market for both coins. In a strong trend, the page lowers the weight of the mean-reversion inputs so one trend-fighting input cannot dominate. Pair mode also shows a short backtest and a correlation view for the inputs it uses.

Prices, market caps and the altcoin breadth read come from CoinGecko. Funding rates, funding spreads and token unlocks come from CoinGlass, stablecoin supply from DeFiLlama, and the MVRV figure from bitcoin-data.com. Fear & Greed is the daily index published by Alternative.me, the same reading as on our Fear & Greed page. Bitcoin production cost is derived from mining difficulty and block rewards, with the network data from blockchain.info.

Most history is daily, so the score moves slowly and does not react to a single candle. The sidebar shows the date the price and RSI data run through, and some inputs, such as Altcoin Breadth, only have a current value without history. The MVRV reading depends on one outside provider. When that provider stops updating, the page warns you and leaves MVRV out of the score rather than showing it as if it were current.

A score is a summary, and summaries lose detail. Keep these in mind.

A made-up example. A coin shows a score of 28, in the Low Risk zone. You open the breakdown and see that Risk Wave and the 4-Year High Distance are low, while Fear & Greed is neutral. The zone card tells you the coin has spent only a few weeks there so far, much shorter than earlier visits.

You also notice that the Token Unlocks modifier flags a large unlock coming up. So you note that the score looks calm but supply risk is not in it. For more on reading extreme market fear, see our guide on Altcoin Rules in extreme fear. The score helped you ask better questions. It did not tell you what to do.

This explainer is free to read for everyone. In the app, free members get a limited number of coins of their own choice, scored with the full set of indicators. The number is set by us and shown on the page and on pricing. A coin outside your free slots shows a locked screen with an upgrade prompt instead of a score.

Premium unlocks every coin, pair mode, and the watchlist matrix, which scores all the coins on your watchlist side by side. You can read the basics on the public Altcoin Rules page and in the glossary entry on what Altcoin Rules are.